The term ‘financial services’ encompasses anything and everything aided in making financial transactions. Wikipedia defined it as the economic services provided by the finance industry, which encompasses a broad range of businesses that manage money, including credit unions, banks, credit-card companies, insurance companies, accountancy companies, consumer-finance companies, stock brokerages, investment funds, individual asset managers, and some government-sponsored enterprises.

 

Anything that manages and safeguards money, aids in financial transactions is a financial service: Rendering services to the financial world. In the country today, there are lots of emerging fintechs’ making money move freely and easily from one country to another. Because of the demand and how lucrative the industry is, that makes it very vulnerable to criminal attacks. 

 

Financial services Cyberattacks have existed for a long time. They are at high risk because of the growing attacks in the sector. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “banks are where the money is, and for cybercriminals, attacking banks offers multiple avenues for profit through extortion, theft, and fraud, while nation-states and hacktivists also target the financial sector for political and ideological leverage.”

 

We can only try our best to prevent the recurrence of these attacks, but to stop them permanently may be difficult as new methods and tactics spring up daily. Here are common financial services attacks to be weary of this year:

  1. Ransomware:  Ransomware is a type of malware that prevents you from accessing your computer (or the data that is stored on it). In this attack, the computer itself may become locked, or the data on it might be stolen, deleted or encrypted. The damage is only reversed if a ransom is paid. The financial services industry is a primary target to ransomware attacks because of the valuable customer information they possess. The threat of leaking their data on the internet, and threatening further damage, leaves many financial services organizations no choice but to comply with ransom demands.
  2. DDoS Attacks in fintech: DDoS or denial of service attacks is a cyber-attack in which the attacker seeks to make a network resource unavailable to its intended users by temporarily or indefinitely disrupting services of a host connected to a network. During a DDoS attack, a victim’s server is halted with fake connection requests, forcing it offline. This form of attack is a popular cyber threat against financial services because they have multiple ways of being attacked, such as banking IT infrastructures, customer accounts, payment portals, etc.
  3. Banking Trojans: Banking trojans are malware that occurs when it is installed in the computer. They wait for the victim to login to an online bank account, and then the trojan captures the user’s credentials such as username and password, and gains access into the account.

The constant need to protect our cyber space cannot be emphasized. Financial services are at high risk of being attacked due to the various services they offer and the kind of information they possess, hence the need to constantly strengthen their security. For example, most of them would require a login pin, or a strict face ID login, or a certain OTP code sent to your phone before you can access their services. These are a few ways they have strengthened their security to protect the users from attacks.

 

We are Platview Technologies. We are an innovative and agile cybersecurity company with the goal of safe-guarding businesses with our world-class, industry-leading services and technology solutions. We commit to understanding your business objectives and goals to align a tailored security services and strategy allowing your business to grow without added security risk.